was a working man, a largely self-taught surveyor in the enclosures-and-canals era of England. He could not, therefore, travel around the world like and spend decades afterwards thinking about what he saw; but he was intensely attentive to the rocks his mines and canals cut through, and the fossils in them, so much so that he invented stratigraphy, the science of understanding geology by looking at the layers rocks are laid in. He was most professionally interested in knowing where coal was likely to be, and where canals wouldn't leak.
England seems to be a pretty good place to do this, but still: most people didn't cotton on. No-one else thought of mapping the geology of Britain, the whole thing!, by dint of travelling across just about all of it personally, taking notes and samples. Several people admired the map that resulted enough to plagiarize it, though; because Smith was not gentle, and not suave, he had a long bad stretch of life in which no-one arranged reward or payment or even interesting work for him. (He gets a patron before he dies, though.) Grand formal English science was half built on excluding outsiders (n.b.; how did Humphry Davy wedge himself in? Faint ties to gentility and friends in the Friends, looks like).
Find in a Library: The Map that Changed the World
So wrote clew in History (19th c.). , Science.